India Misreads US's China Policy as Being Automatically Pro-India

The Xi-Trump summit in Washington has brought India’s foreign-policy dilemma into unusually sharp relief. For more than two decades, the United States has seen India as an important part of the answer to the rise of China. That was never quite an alliance, and India was never prepared to become an instrument of the US against Beijing. But the logic was clear: a stronger India, strategically aligned with the US and its partners, would provide a useful counterweight to Chinese power in Asia.

But the message coming out of the Trump-Xi summit last week is that that role is no longer a viable one. Nothing in the summit’s statements or actions said so explicitly. But the atmospherics did the talking : A deferential US president shepherding around a somewhat stoic and probably wary Chinese leader through a grand, and even over-the-top, reception in Washington, sends a louder message than anything else.

Then, there were the nuts and bolts. Little or no mention was made of the recent Graham Act that has authorised the US president to place up to 100% tariffs on countries like China and India who continue to buy Russian oil. Indeed, Trump refused to respond to a question on that score shouted at him in one of the events.

An emerging understanding between Washington and Beijing

The impression, therefore, is less of a new Sino-American alliance than of an emerging understanding between Washington and Beijing that competition must be stabilised and managed. One could call it the beginnings of a G2 dynamic – not because the two countries have suddenly become partners, but because their relationship increasingly appears to constitute the axis around which major global issues are being organised.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

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On the other hand, on September 23 in New York, India’s external affairs minister S. Jaishankar was told by his US counterpart secretary of state Marco Rubio, that the US would “help” India to deal with its energy problems. The US readout noted: “The two also discussed sanctions that could be levelled against states that engage economically with Russia and Iran.

The secretary emphasised that the US remains well-positioned to help regional partners address their energy security challenges.

In its statement after the passage of the Graham Act, a Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) statement had said, “This issue has been discussed at high levels in recent months with various US interlocutors. Its potential implications for not just the bilateral relationship but also the international energy market have been very clearly articulated by the Indian side.”

A senior state department official speaking to The Hindustan Times in the US essentially asked India to lump it. The report said that the US has taken note of Indian warnings that this could have an adverse impact on India-US relations. Somewhat fatuously the official pointed out that the president had a lot of waiver authority along with the Graham Act, without really indicating that India would receive one. He too took the view that the US would help diversify its sources, particularly from Venezuela.

The US has already become a major supplier of LNG and LPG to India, in addition to some crude. But neither Rubio, nor the official note that oil and gas from the distant US comes with a significant markup because of the distance and, in addition, it takes anywhere up to a couple of weeks to reach India, as compared to less than a week from sources in the Persian Gulf.

The China factor in India-US relationship

Since the late 1990s, the US's strategic opening to India was driven by several considerations: India’s economic rise, its border dispute with China, its location and, increasingly, the emergence of China as a major strategic competitor. Washington’s view of India changed substantially during the Clinton and Bush administrations. By the early 2000s, senior US officials were explicitly describing India as a country of growing strategic importance to the US and Asia.

The China factor subsequently became an important component of this relationship. The Quad, the Indo-Pacific strategy, defence cooperation and the growing convergence between the two countries were all shaped, to varying degrees, by concern about Chinese power.

But the Trump-Xi encounter suggests that India should no longer assume that Washington’s China policy will automatically translate into an Indian strategic advantage. The reason is not that the US has suddenly become friendly towards China. The summit demonstrated the opposite: the two countries remain competitors over technology, artificial intelligence, trade, Taiwan and critical supply chains. What appears to be changing is the American preference for confrontation. Trump seems increasingly willing to compartmentalise differences with Beijing where it serves US interests.

That is where the distinction between China and India becomes particularly revealing. China came to Washington as America’s principal strategic competitor. Yet the summit was conducted against a background of negotiations and talks over trade and tariffs, AI and Taiwan, to prevent the relationship from spiralling into a confrontation.

India needs to recognise that US policy is increasingly transactional. Washington will cooperate with India where US interests coincide with Indian interests, just as it will negotiate with China where doing so serves US interests. That makes strategic autonomy more, rather than less, relevant.

India’s objective cannot be to become a permanent counterweight to China in an American strategy. Nor should it be to distance itself from the US because Washington is engaging Beijing. It must instead build enough economic, technological, military and diplomatic heft to deal with both powers without becoming dependent on either.

The Washington summit is important for India because it exposed the limits of an assumption on which much of India’s recent foreign-policy thinking has rested: that the US, as India’s most consequential strategic partner, would continue to see India’s rise as an important instrument in managing China. That assumption was never entirely inaccurate. The US-India alignment has been one of the favourable geopolitical circumstances that has helped India expand its economic, technological and military capabilities. But it was always contingent on the convergence of American and Indian interests.

The distinction matters because the US is now seeking to reduce its dependence on regional partners – not just India – even as it tries to stabilise its relationship with China. Washington will continue to compete with Beijing over technology, trade, Taiwan and strategic influence, but it also appears increasingly willing to compartmentalise those differences where cooperation or accommodation serves US interests. India cannot assume that every step taken by Washington to manage China will strengthen India’s position. Nor can it assume that US pressure on India over issues such as Russian oil will be moderated because of the broader strategic relationship.

India faces a more demanding strategic environment

This leaves India facing a more demanding strategic environment at precisely the time when its geopolitical circumstances are becoming more complicated. Tensions with Bangladesh remain unresolved; the Iran war has added another layer of uncertainty to India’s western neighbourhood; and the emerging Pakistan-Saudi Arabia-Türkiye relationship presents a further complication. India’s economic and demographic prospects remain favourable, but favourable circumstances do not automatically translate into strategic heft.

New Delhi is already attempting to adjust. It is building a more distributed regional network involving Japan, Australia, Indonesia and other Indo-Pacific countries, while strengthening ties with the UAE and Israel. These relationships can broaden India’s room for manoeuvre, but they cannot substitute for national capability. The US will remain an important source of capital, technology, markets and strategic cooperation. The point is that India must engage the US as a partner whose interests will sometimes converge with its own and sometimes diverge from them.

The larger lesson of Washington, therefore, is not that the US has abandoned India or embraced China. It is that the strategic relationship between Washington and Beijing will increasingly be conducted on Washington’s and Beijing’s terms, not India’s. New Delhi can no longer rely on the assumption that American competition with China will automatically work to its advantage. Its task is to build enough economic, technological, military and diplomatic heft to manage both relationships on its own account. Strategic autonomy, in these circumstances, is not about keeping the US at arm’s length. It is about ensuring that India’s choices remain its own.

The writer is a distinguished fellow with the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi.

This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.

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